Four other books

My first book, the Life and Death of Olof Palme, a biography of Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister, sometimes dubbed “Scandinavia’s Kennedy”, is not only the biography of a man, but a biography of Sweden – if you like. It is a deeply penetrating look at a much-admired country, written with profound inside knowledge and based on enormous quantities of research. The biography takes in the transition of Sweden from being a conservative, aristocratic, assertively militaristic country of the early 20th century to becoming the social democrat utopia, so admired abroad, by the end of the century. How did Sweden become the “humanitarian superpower”? And who did kill the man whose idealistic foreign policy angered governments, both east, west and south? Despite 30 years of investigations, the police still have no candidate. My book, based on never before published interviews, attempts to give an answer, but the main focus is on the life and times of a politician whose charisma and intelligence have had no equal in Scandinavia.

The second book,Sweden, Dying to be Multicultural, is the book based on the documentary available on Amazon Prime (see elsewhere on this blog.) It looks at the effects of the current large wave of Middle Eastern and African immigration into Sweden. The book looks at the way out-of-control immigration affects tax solidarity, free speech, the sustainability of the welfare state.

Sweden is getting a lot more than what it bargained for. Spread of Muslim networks under the cover of being human rights organisations. Hostility from disenfranchised working class communities who have borne the brunt of the refugee arrivals, many of whom are boys claiming to be under 18, but who in some cases have grey hair. Rumours have it that Isis is spreading activists through the refugee movements.

Swedish openness was about providing atonement for the West’s sins in the Middle East as well as rebalancing a population pyramid, heavily tilted towards the over 65’s. But economic immigration only works if the arrivals get into employment quickly; but for various reasons, including the Swedish high skills economy and the informally networked nature of Swedish life, means that the often undereducated arrivals live on social benefits and so are a burden, displacing benefits that native pensioners would have had. Immigration has steadily polarised Swedish society and this is an insider’s account of every aspect of the issue from the history of the Sweden Democrat anti-immigrant party to the Stockholm-versus-rural polarity that means the elites find hard to keep tabs on what’s going on in the public mind. The terrorist attack in Stockholm in April 2017 showed that Sweden is not immune to the political and religious pressures that have affected the rest of Europe.

I think those who believe the EU has solely been a vehicle for German or French interests are mistaken. The single market has benefited global and American companies, and nary a voice of doubt has been raised against it from the left. The book looks at the ideology of globalisation that seduced the left after the cold war, the European left’s abandonment of its working class core vote and its embrace of global capitalism and global human rights, which gave support to America’s “human rights wars” in the Middle East and gave open ended commitments to migration. This new Europe is more consumeristic and diverse. But is it a better place?

This is from the book blurb:

“Britain has had its independence day from Europe. But where will Britain go next? Contrary to the eurosceptic obsession with “the Germans” or “Brussels”, the overwhelming force in British and European lives and the European political scene has, for decades, been the preponderant power of the United States.
Consider how US power affects us today. American foreign policy in the Middle East is largely responsible for the refugee flows Europe is experiencing. The EU single market project has benefited American and international corporations, while democracy at a national level has suffered, and it is resource-poor private individuals who have been the losers from the mass immigration flows that have resulted from a border-free Europe.
Brussels is popularly blamed for being a source of unaccountable power. But I argue it is wrong to focus on the Eurocrats. Rather, Brussels is just a conduit for other, greater forces that have pushed Europe into a direction characterised by economic, ethnic and social mixing in a model that takes after the United States. EU legislation helps US companies expand. Multiculturalism has been an ideology lifted from American academia. It gripped New Labour, which threw the doors wide open to immigration in the name of creating a cool Britannia of racial and religious diversity. But the force of this influence is no recent thing. The European movement, forerunner of today’s EU, few people are aware, received generous funding from the US government in order to get started in the 1950s; while American denazification procedures during the Cold War created the anti-nationalist, self-denying Germany we see today. This book looks at the various “vectors” of American influence, and asks why the interventions in the Middle East took the form they did. What was Washington’s motivation for the chaos created? It also looks at some of the rebellious forces in Europe against American power and argues that the British have to be aware of this “elephant in the European living room” when, standing as they are at a cross-roads of their history, they contemplate Britain’s future orientation

What did you do in the War, Sweden? What on earth can be written about WW2 which hasn’t been said before? Here is a rare fresh perspective: that of a democratic welfare state coexisting peacefully with Nazism, deep inside Hitler’s European Empire. In neutral Sweden there were daily flights to Berlin and the ferry to occupied Copenhagen ran uninterrupted through the war years. The Swedish king visited Berlin, as did acting troupes and sports teams which competed in European Championships in which only Sweden and the German satellites participated. It was not very dignified war existence, but Sweden survived, thanks to a number of shoddy compromises and deals with both sides that helped put Sweden ahead of the competition after the world war. Thanks to a very sharp eye for self-promotion and what looks good with the international public, Sweden’s World War II record is little-known compared to its reputation today. This pamphlet gives the reader interested in Sweden background to an interesting period in Sweden’s history, when Stockholm was a playground for Allied and Axis spies and democracy teetered on the edge, surviving thanks to appeasement and far-reaching compromise with dictatorship.